MIDI + LV2: still incomplete or just horribly broken?

I'm doing my best to be constructive here and not just bitching, honestly I don't mean any disrespect to the developers. I was feeling so enthusiastic about what could be done with Ardour 3 and I want to love it. I am very interested in a free, professional-grade DAW as a means to teach others to use Linux for MIDI sequencing.

I have a fairly simple workflow when it comes to making a track, not much beyond what Seq24 does. What I really needed was to be able to create a MIDI region that triggers different samples from an LV2 sampler plugin (preferably a single instance), each with different volume, panning and (ideally) effects chain. I would then need to able to copy / paste it, make copies unique and tweak them. It should be possible to save the project and re-load it as it was without having to launch any external apps such as Hydrogen. That's it.

In trying to achieve the above, I hit problem after problem after problem, lost random chunks of projects for no apparent reason and ended up tearing my hair out. I have raised four separate bug reports and am yet to even get started putting a track together, hoping this will be positive for future development at least. I have not donated any money to the project yet, but I hope to soon.

So is it just me? Is it just too soon to be using Ardour as my main MIDI sequencer? Really interested to know what others think here. I know it is a lot to expect from free and open-source software, but none of the bugs I have hit appear to exist in Qtractor. Ardour 3 strikes me as a beautiful piece of software, but so much of its basic functionality appears to be broken right now.

It isn’t just you. Ardour still has issues involving MIDI and LV2 which I and others with MIDI-oriented use cases are reporting/sponsoring. Paul has promised improvements for MIDI in version 3.7 (https://community.ardour.org/node/7581)

I have made several complete tracks in Ardour, but in my humble, non-developer opinion it may not be ready for what you want to use it for yet. But stick around (kudos for reporting bugs) and contribute financially if you can, and Ardour will keep on getting better.

To me you don’t sound like you’re bitching, it is frustrating when crashes happen in the heat of the moment, but stay on board and with your and everyone else’s support Ardour can become ever more reliable.

I did a complete orchestral session with Ardour 3.5.357 (but I may have luck, and I used only two different lv2 plugins, about 30 instances of linuxsampler-lv2, and ir-lv2). The previous version were very unstable, but this one was surprinsigly a little less unstable. Some tracks disaparead when I reopened the session later but it was better than the previous versions : in particular, Ardour did not crash randomly when I inserted midi notes, dit not crash (and worse, corrupt the session after a crash) at all, in fact!

Thanks for the replies, I'm glad I didn't come across as too irritating. I don't mind spending time testing and raising bug reports, just sorry I can't help to debug the offending code. I am learning C / C++ but it's early days.

I should add that Qtractor is not without its problems, but it does allow me to do most of what I want to do without losing settings or data. For me Ardour 3 is a bit of a curate's egg at present, but I will keep trying different things and feed back anything that might be useful to Paul and the other developers.